Histories of our associates: .HN

LACTLD shares the histories of its associate members that were included in the 20th Anniversary Publication. In this article, we present the historical review of .HN.

The first .HN developments started in 1994, when the UN Development Program established the “Sustainable Development Networking Program” (SDNP) in Honduras. The SDNP was the first provider of email services in the country and it was in charge of requesting ICANN the delegation of the .HN top-level domain.

A few years later, in 1998, the SDNP became a non-governmental, non-profit organization, and it changed its name to Sustainable Development Network - Honduras (RDS-HN, in Spanish). This way, its guided management was set in motion, since the very first moment, to make a socially-responsible innovative project out of the .HN domain.

With an approach based on sustainability, ethics, and transparency, it redesigned its operational structure in 2006 by making an alliance with the domain registry operator Afilias.

In 2009, the RDS-HN created the International Bureau of Technologies - Honduras (BIT-HN, in Spanish). This organism was set up, on the one hand, for the commercialization of .HN domains. On the other hand, it undertook the explicit task to strengthen social management and development programs targeted at vulnerable communities in the country. Under this new operational dynamic, in 2012, an alliance with Registry Services Limited CoCCA was entered into. Through this agreement, end users were able to sign all the .HN zones with DNSSEC, and two services were added: Anycast (ISC and PCH) and a Unicast server with .MX.

In 2013, the .HN also joined LOGICBOXES with the purpose of broadening its catalog of added-value services available for its users.

For twenty-four years, the .HN has been the protagonist of technological innovation applied to social processes in Honduras. Among its contributions, there is the promotion of ICT in the production, business and entrepreneurial sectors. In addition, there is the promotion and support of the ISOC-HN chapter, together with its contribution to the first intelligent community for the indigenous people in Honduras.

The .HN is expected to keep its responsible technological contribution geared towards the social, cultural, human and environmental development of Honduras.